Accountant Andrew Krowne has developed a phone app so that people in the San Fernando Valley can report symptoms they are experiencing that they believe are related to the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility above Porter Ranch. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

More than two years after a massive natural gas leak was detected near his northern San Fernando Valley home, Andrew Krowne said he still gets “crazy headaches” and blurry vision at times.

But it wasn’t until earlier this year that he thought of developing an app to track residents’ symptoms while a comprehensive health study on the 2015-16 gas leak at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility has yet to be conducted.

“With the lack of government and regulatory action, and with (the Southern California Gas Co.) trying to tell people everything is fine….it is vitally important for the community to track what is really happening to it,” said Krowne, an accountant and activist who serves as treasurer of the Porter Ranch Neighborhood Council.

A new app aims to track environmental health concerns of those affected by the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility near Porter Ranch. (Courtesy)

The Environmental Health Tracker app allows community members to quickly submit and track their own health symptoms that could be related to the underground natural gas storage facility owned and operated by SoCalGas.

As of Saturday, the free app had about 130 users and 2,000 symptoms reported since it launched in mid-October, Krowne said.

“We’re absolutely getting valuable data on symptomology – not just here in Porter Ranch but I have reports from Chatsworth, Granada Hills, Woodland Hills, Lake Balboa, Studio City and Northridge,” he said.

The app can also be used to report symptoms related to other “environmental areas of concern” across the region and country, whether it’s a natural gas storage field, an oil refinery, a natural gas odorant spill like the one that happened recently on the Westside or even a chili sauce plant, he said. But first someone would have to establish an area of concern for their community for a significant fee.

Chris Gilbride, a spokesman for SoCalGas, argued there was no reason to be concerned about any long-term health risks related to the Aliso Canyon facility.

“All of the extensive data collected and analyzed by public health officials over the last two years have shown that there was and is no long-term risk to public health or safety from the gas leak,” Gilbride said in a statement.

While data collected had indicated known carcinogen levels related to the gas leak were below thresholds of concern per state exposure guidelines, Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s toxicology chief has previously said that a long-term health study is needed to determine whether exposed residents could develop cancer.

Earlier this year, SoCalGas agreed to an $8.5 million settlement with air quality regulators, with $1 million of those funds to go toward a health study. (Los Angeles County health officials have said that isn’t nearly enough to conduct a comprehensive health study.)

Krowne’s family was among the roughly 8,300 households that relocated following the massive gas leak that spewed more than 100,000 metric tons of potent methane into the atmosphere over nearly four months.The incident sickened hundreds of area residents and prompted the governor to declare a state of emergency before the offending well was capped in February of 2016.

While some residents have been reporting health symptoms to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health by phone or online, Krowne argues that he and others “don’t trust” local health officials to do anything meaningful with their data and contends it’s easier to use his app.

Since November 2015, the Department of Public Health has received more than 2,100 health complaints from some 1,200 households potentially related to the Aliso Canyon facility, the agency said recently. About 90 of those were received between Aug. 1 and November 29.

The data that has been and is being compiled since the leak began will be used to inform the comprehensive health study for which the department has been advocating, the health department said in an email.

State regulators gave SoCalGas the green light in late July to resume injecting gas into the underground storage facility on a limited basis following a comprehensive safety review, assuring residents the facility was safe.

Since then, the South Coast Air Quality Management District has received about 180 air-quality complaints, an agency spokesman said in late November.

The app relies on the honesty of its users for accuracy. And while there’s no way to know for sure if a symptom is related to the storage facility – Krowne argued that people who have lived here are now familiar with the kinds of symptoms attributed to methane and odorant emissions.

The data would eventually get analyzed and could potentially be used by a health organization or elected officials, he said.

The lack of health data ” was a gigantic glaring hole in our overall fight for the health of this community,” Krowne said, adding that his greatest ambition it to have the facility shuttered once and for all.

Brenda Gazzar is a multilingual multimedia reporter who has worked for a variety of news outlets in California and in the Middle East since 2000. She has covered a range of issues, including breaking news, immigration, law and order, race, religion and gender issues, politics, human interest stories and education. Besides the Los Angeles Daily News and its sister papers, her work has been published by Reuters, the Denver Post, Ms. Magazine, the Jerusalem Post, USA Today, the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, The Cairo Times and others. Brenda speaks Spanish, Hebrew and intermediate Arabic and is the recipient of national, state and regional awards, including a National Headliners Award and one from the Associated Press News Executives' Council. She holds a dual master's degree in Communications/Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

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